Move to the Snap package format
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You do realize you can offer both a snap and a deb file right?
I just want a snap for it's automagic updating feature, also I've personally not experienced any storage issues from using snaps.
Yet again a repo would be nice aswell.
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Seems to me Opera was offering snaps, but there are issues ... since neither Opera nor Vivaldi comes with proprietary codecs, a snap version can't play proprietary media formats. With a regular package format you can install proprietary codecs separately and Vivaldi will use them; with a snap it doesn't.
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@mrmidnight why would you want auto updating? why is that a good thing. How many times have you had something force updates on you and ended up with bugs and regressions.
if you have the ppa then updates will show up in your package manager, just click update. that way you control what gets updated.
If anything, "automatic updates" is another reason not to use snaps.
Im one of these people who likes to read changelogs and check for issues before updating things
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As of today, Chromium, Firefox, Midori and Opera, have already released a snap package. Chromium additionally released 'chromium-ffmpeg' for codecs.
According to the snap website 14 distributions already support snap (and very likely can be installed in more): Arch Linux, Debian, elementary OS, Fedora, Gentoo, Linux Mint, Manjaro, Yocto, openSUSE, OpenWrt, Pop! OS, Solus, Raspbian and Ubuntu.
Preparing a snap package is not be that complicated. At first, Vivaldi can release a snap using the 'edge' or the 'beta' branch, which users may know is not 100% ready (as Thunderbird did).
As
mrmidnight
said, deb and rpm can be still the main packages (until snap is widely adopted). I believe the idea is to increase the number of users using Vivaldi, and having a snap package can help to reach other distributions in which before was not so easy to support.I don't see any valid reason on why Vivaldi shouldn't follow that path. As you know, snaps are executed in a sandbox, which is ideal for browsers to increase security (I'm personally very interested in this point).
@Dimspace Why wouldn't you want to auto-update your browser? security updates should be applied as soon as they are released, right? If something gets broken, its easy to rollback to an early version when using snap.
Please don't take it personal, we all want Vivaldi success, so please consider adding a snap package.
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I found out this post from few days ago:
In the future, we hope this situation will improve, as we plan to introduce support for Snap packages.
Great news! Looking forward to it ... I guess that closes this discussion.
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According to the snap website 14 distributions already support snap
how many of those actually support snap natively? Mint doesnt support snap natively (and even once you install snap its pretty flakey).
only two of those support snapd by default. Ubuntu and Solus
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As
mrmidnight
said, deb and rpm can be still the main packages (until snap is widely adopted).im gonna stick my neck out and say there will never be a day that snap is so widely adopted that deb and rpm are discarded in favor of snap.
its not even clear right now if snap will end up being the betamax to flatpaks vhs.
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@Dimspace Why wouldn't you want to auto-update your browser? security updates should be applied as soon as they are released, right?
not always. countless reasons why not, you only have to look at recent changes made by firefox or chrome that caused upset to users from security or privacy pov's to see why we should always have the choice to upgrade. or regressions if you are running preview versions of browsers.
web browser is probabl.y the one thing above all i dont want autoupdating until ive had a read of the changelog
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@ruario with the current availability and state of
Flatpak
andSnap
, I would be interested in the benefits considering the Vivaldi use case for favouring the later.I was under the impression that
Flatpak
has (now) wider distribution, no restriction to a central Ubuntu repository, less system(d) dependencies and is (easier?) usable for unpriviledged users. -
@becm heres a good overview of snap v flat pak availability in distro's repos https://kamikazow.wordpress.com/2018/06/08/adoption-of-flatpak-vs-snap-2018-edition/
outside of ubuntu snap is pretty poorly supported
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I voted for Vivaldi snap package because the snap sandboxing is quite stable compare to other packages.
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you said firejail needs some tweaking and I don't think all linux users/noobs like tweaking so much. That is why snap is quite famous and simple. Although, I admitted snap is quite ram and space consuming
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@guigirl I am not against the proprietary platform or anything. But, for a technical perspective, I agreed flatpak is better than snap because flatpak can share dependencies with other flatpak apps. So, we can save some spaces on this occasion.
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devs gonna do what devs gonna do; but my opinion on snaps is they are unwelcome and un-needed.
It doesn't offend my existence or anything if that tickles their fancy; but RPMs, DEBs, Tarballs, Flatpak, AppImage, are all better than Snaps.
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